Star Packs and Rewards Update
There will be some new packs joining the store soon! Well, variations of old packs (Silver, Gold & Holo). We will be adding the long awaited “guaranteed quality” packs, including Stars, that will offset some of the chance element when spending your hard earned MGC! At the same time, we will also be splitting general packs into a few different groups: Summer Leagues, Winter Leagues, UC International Teams, and U23.
Additionally, while we are aiming to not make too many major gameplay changes mid season, we have some overall reward balance changes coming along with the update. Though we are still kicking off discussions around larger future adjustments, and have a small survey included at the end.
This update (excluding the future direction elements) would land in game within the next few weeks, with gameweek changes likely starting in GW129 after the break.
⚽ - This update is for the Football platform, and will be extended to Basketball at a later date with appropriate changes to suit the sport.
Guaranteed Quality Packs
There will be 3 different variations of packs: Underdogs, Starters, and Stars. Each containing athletes that match a range of “Performance Index” scores — which to start are simply equal to athlete draft prices (subject to later change). With the addition of split Summer/Winter/International/U23 packs, this will be adding a lot of choice to the store!
🪙 — As a reminder, draft prices in football are based on the Last 20 scores of the athlete, with more weight given to the most recent matches.
Our goal is to reduce the frustrating moments from spending your hard earned MGC, but retain as much of the excitement as possible. The different pack types will have some overlap of athletes, allowing lower quality packs to still have a chance to receive high quality athletes, but a portion will be exclusive — meaning that the top few performing athletes at any moment will be reserved for managers saving up for star packs. This will hopefully add some extra value to winning those top spots for huge MGC rewards!
Additionally, the current Performance Index/Draft Price calculation does not take into account which team or league athletes are from, it is strictly based on UC scores. This means that athletes from top tier clubs can still be found in ANY pack type, depending on their recent form relative to their league.
Worried that the current packs (now called “Starters”) wont be worth it anymore? While some Stars won’t be available as Starters, low performing cards will also be exclusive to the Underdogs packs. Starters packs will be much more reliable and the best value to add consistently “good” athletes to your line-up.
Updated Pack Structure
A small change will be made to the drop chance structure in packs. The primary card in the higher quality will be the same as before: guaranteed Epic (Silver)/Mythic (Gold), with a small chance to upgrade rarity.
The secondary drop will no longer have a chance to upgrade rarity. Instead, the secondary drop will have a 10% chance to upgrade PERFORMANCE tier (Stars cannot upgrade).
1️⃣ Silver Drop 1: 95% Epic, 5% Mythic
2️⃣ Silver Drop 2: 100% Common (10% chance to upgrade a quality tier)
This gives managers buying non Star packs the chance to still receive their favourite top athlete, but it is guaranteed to be in a lower quality so as not to outvalue a higher cost pack through luck. Additionally it will help encourage buying non-star packs, moving to higher quality packs (from Silver to Gold, for a higher rarity second drop), and further reduce NFTs added to the game.
Holo Packs
Holo packs will have their own custom structure, as the most expensive pack in the game with a GUARANTEED UNIQUE! The previous version was a huge gamble with a chance to receive any athlete, and even then the value wasn’t amazing. While they still won’t be a common purchase, the new structure will be a much safer MGC investment for those keen to unpack their first Unique:
1️⃣ Drop 1:
- 75% Standard unique
- 25% Star unique
2️⃣3️⃣ Drop 2 & 3:
- 100% Standard Mythic
With of course the same variations for: Winter Leagues, Summer Leagues, UC International Teams, and U23 — at their relevant prices.
Other Pack Types
Kickoff, Basic, Jumbo, and National packs will all be “STARTERS” quality only. This means they will stay at the same price, but will have vastly more consistent good-great athlete contents.
The reason that we are not adding quality tiers of every national pack is that the pool in each national is not large enough to fill its own Star pack, and targeting an exact card is not the point of packs. Choosing the exact card you want is what the Marketplace is for!
Pack Collection Score Requirements
The Collection Score required for most packs will also be lowered, and will now change based on quality (Underdogs/Starters/Stars) rather than type (Global/Nationals/U23). It was quite aggressive before as a safety net due to a high amount of cards being distributed, which has now been significantly reduced in other ways!
End Result
The highest priority is to simply remove some frustration and reduce the sense of risk from MGC packs. This is what you have requested for a long time! The argument commonly made against these types of packs is losing the chance to receive competitive athletes as a newer manager with less access to MGC. We hope that you agree that we have found a good compromise: retaining the chance to receive an exceptionally good athlete in any pack, but still offering enough advantage to be worth saving for the more expensive packs.
Additionally, these new packs will also further reduce the total NFTs entering the ecosystem. Where previously a top Manager would have bought three gold packs hoping for a good card, they will now save for just one and be GUARANTEED two Star cards — but in doing so the 4 “junk” cards that would have previously ended up on the marketplace are now never minted. When combined with the change to the pack structure, this is another huge win for NFT sustainability.
Pack Contents Data (Details)
Here we will deep dive a little bit on the performance cut off for athletes and the data, so if that does not interest you feel free to skip ahead to the next section!
📓 Context: The mean average athlete that as an approximate Last 15 score of 100 has a Performance Index (Draft Price) of 9. The total range at time of calculation is 2.9 to 17.3.
Underdogs: 0–8 PI, 0.5x Price, 0.5x CS Requirement
Starters: 7–12 PI, 1x Price, 1x CS Requirement
Stars: 11+ PI, 3x Price, 1.5x CS Requirement
There will also be a small additional price increase on UC International (25%) and U23 (50%) packs due to higher average market values of these cards.
With this set up and according to the latest data: packs of Starters will reward cards with an almost identical average market value to our current packs — though with much less volatility (Underdogs and Stars removed). Star pack on the other hand have prices that not only match the increase in average market value, but also have a small additional margin - to account for exclusive access to top cards, the smaller pool of athlete, and to ensure the cards aren’t devalued by the ability to target these Stars.
Athlete Counts
In a recent calculation, these were the total counts of athletes within each performance bracket, across all leagues:
Underdogs: 372 Athletes (128 Exclusive athletes)
Starters: 687 Athletes (316 Exclusive athletes)
Stars: 175 Athletes (37 Exclusive athletes)
📓Athletes will regularly drop in and out of tiers dynamically as games are played.
Star Pack Example Contents
Below is what would currently be contained in a “UC International Star Pack”, in order of performance Index.
A Gold UC International Star pack costs 37500 MGC, and guarantees two of these athletes: one in Mythic quality, and one in Epic quality.
A list of all distributed athletes and their CURRENT Performance Index scores can be found below! We hope to provide a live dynamic list in the future.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fPnczpjq54e6-CQWLAhWZD_zOh8AqckkQQ-M51pJgUY/edit#gid=4142680
Other Balance Changes
As mentioned there are some additional other balance changes coming with this update. The rewards are in a bit of an interesting place at the moment: we gave away more CHAMP that ever before in October, which adds downward pressure on the CHAMP price, but following the previous few tournament updates and overall direction tournaments have moved in they are now spread quite thin compared to last season when we had 2–3 per Gameweek.
We have discussed more major changes to the tournament structure (see the “Future” section below for details), but this would be a larger update that makes more sense at the start of a new season. THIS update is aimed more at a smaller check in on the balance, and addressing some regular feedback:
- Increase the matches required for some tournaments to be run, targeted at unbalanced small midweek Gameweeks
- Increase the static rewarded positions to the top 7–15 managers (depending on tournament) in each tournament (up from the top 5), replacing the top 10–25% positions from divisions that don’t receive enough entries to trigger them
- Increase MGC rewards to account for higher cost MGC packs, mostly in top positions and divisions
- Add back some NFTs to a top few positions in the flagship tournaments, to boost the excitement of these high investment positions without adding more CHAMP (test)
- Some small adjustments to tournament entry requirements, reducing the maximum epics allowed in top higher divisions
Tournament Match Requirements
The requirements were originally intended to be very basic an open, but it’s common that mid-week Gameweeks have had a budget disproportionate to the teams playing and marketplace activity during that time.
With approximately 70 Winter teams and 50 Summer teams in UC, the changes below equate to roughly the following:
🌐 Ultimate Champions will still run in mid-weeks, but will change to 5-A-side when there are particularly few teams.
👶 U23 will be active in larger mid-weeks, and most weekends.
🎉 Special tournaments with custom restrictions will only be active on weekends.
⭐ All-Stars, as what is essentially a second Global tournament, will only be active in near-full weekends.
Champ Rewards
- 2nd-15th positions now more gradually decrease, rewarding more positions but with less weight in 2nd/3rd
- Lower divisions have had their Champion reward notably increased
- Pro has had a slight reduction, as it was very rewarding for the requirements
- World Class has been significantly increased, as the only top division not receiving NFTs
- Stars and Legends are the same or have been slightly decreased, but will now receive valuable NFT rewards (detailed further on)
- Percent Positions no longer receive Champ, which was moved to static positions
MGC Rewards
MGC Rewards have a very similar structure, but have been increased in the top divisions, and award more to positions 6–15 which previously would have received top 10% rewards in most cases.
Currency Reward Scales & U23
All “Reward Scaling” values are remaining the same, except for U23, which uniquely has a custom boost to MGC rewards. The boost will be further increased from 130% to 150%, to match the pack prices and be in place of the NFTs. This makes U23 easily the best place to win MGC for those Star packs!
Updated Table of Reward Scales
NFT Rewards
We are adding some NFT rewards back to our flagship tournaments, to boost the value in these positions — both as the highest investment tournaments in the game, and to better reward the increased investment needed in these higher divisions.
All-Stars has higher quality cards compared to Ultimate Champions to offset the fact that with the new rules it will be run less often, and as it has higher average investment needed to reach top positions. Create your Ultimate team on the big weekends here for a shot at a Star card!
Nationals do not receive NFTs and instead World Class has received a Champ increase, as due to the number of nationals that would distribute an exponential amount of NFTs, and they are often run with very low related matches.
Tournament Entry Requirements
The divisions are in quite a good place for the moment and are more of a new season topic, though the one item we would like to address is the utility of Epics throughout all divisions. Epics continue to be a powerful asset for all Managers, up to everything including World Class, which is reflected in their value compared to Mythics. These few adjustments will slightly lower the amount of Epics usable in particularly Star/World Class, without completely removing them.
Future Direction Survey
This update brings in the long awaited star packs, and makes some balance adjustments, however we avoided changing the tournament structure which was only updated recently with the start of the new season.
We do however have in mind some larger POSSIBLE changes to the games structure direction that could make a huge impact in the future.
You can find a survey below, where we want to start gathering your thoughts and kickoff the conversation. (finish reading first!)
Survey Link: https://forms.gle/ePuhYZFRKbuCkM146
Combining Tournaments
As mentioned, our reward budget has increased over time, but the rewards have becoming increasingly small as we spread them over more tournaments. There are two places where this is especially notable.
Combined Ultimate Champions and All-Stars
These are essentially 2 extensions of our original “Global” tournament, and they make up around 40% of the total Champ reward budget. We originally thought it was important to offer both, as the community is almost exactly 50/50 split on which is preferred, and each add value to different cards.
If we were to remove one, we could consider other ways to offer both capped and uncapped modes (though likely not to the same extent), and have 20% of our total budget to redistribute either as a huge boost to the other Global, or spread between all other tournaments.
Combined Nationals
With similar logic, the amount of nationals we have accounts for 30% of the Champ reward budget, and the quantity means a lot of teams to enter and choices to make each gameweek. We could imagine several options, such as combining full leagues while keeping our current ”internationals” separate, or even doing a complete mix including the international teams AND leagues.
This would free up another portion of Champ to redistribute, and would also solve the question of how many seasons we will run a national for if we only release one season of a League.
The downside is of course losing the option to play in a single-league tournament as a fan of the League, but we have not seen quite the engagement in investment in these individual nationals required to offset the current budget.
Smaller Items
These are some more miscellaneous changes that have less significant impact, but we think are important topics to receive community feedback on before considering.
Permanent Underdogs, in place of the rotating “Special”
Underdogs has been a favourite when it comes to the specials for a while, and is valuable when it comes to making use of your lower scoring cards. It could ESPECIALLY make sense to offer permanently now that we will be offering Underdog packs at a discount.
While we are not currently considering adding more total tournaments (for obvious reasons in this article), it could permanently replace the rotating specials — which have become less prominent in the game over time.
This is a decision we are quite happy to leave up to Managers, so be sure to fill in the survey!
Increased Unique Requirements in Legends
We are beginning some small steps to improve the value of Mythics where we can, but it is a little more difficult with Uniques where only 1 is required throughout all divisions right now.
The option has been on the table for a while to require an additional Unique in legends as we have reached a point (after ~two seasons) of having enough in the ecosystem to make it possible, however it would obviously massively effect the managers playing in Legends.
Once again this is a decision that would heavily rely on Manager response, so be sure to fill in the survey!
DISCUSSION ONLY!
Please keep in mind that these future direction options are talking points only, and are subjects where we would like to get a sense of the communities feelings before even considering them. Any trading done based on these points is entirely at your own risk!
This was a long one! Thanks for reading until the end, and please fill in the quick survey to have your voice heard on the future topics.
Survey Link (again): https://forms.gle/ePuhYZFRKbuCkM146
Guaranteed quality packs are a huge change, and we hope it is positive for everyone — the chance to save MGC knowing you will get a great card, more consistently useful results from our currently priced “Starters” packs, and another positive move for the card economy.
Thanks for your continued support,
The UC Team
